Missing roof, wet cows, windblown roses

Chère amie, cher ami,

Since last I wrote, the storms continued here in Normandy, filling the nappephréatique with rain and swelling the streams that run through our park and carry water out to the cattle still grazing in the pastures.

Where once there was a pleasant trickle in the ruisseau, a spectacular waterfall en miniature tumbles down the rocks.

The wild wind blew down a tree in the field of colza. But otherwise, the oaks and plane trees, the immense sequoia and the pines in the park are holding firm.

Autumn has blasted in, shaking off yellow leaves, strewing the garden grass with petals. A few blackened apples cling to the orchard trees. The roses hang down their red, and golden heads, their withering blooms thick with water.

In my last Letter, I promised to write more about our trip to Valognes, up north in the fastness of the Cotentin peninsula. 

When we returned to the Chateau, however, a large piece of the roof was floating in the moat. The electrical box in the basse-cour had been soaked, short-circuiting the fuel pump and the lights in the stabulations.  And an impressive topography of nids de poule — hen’s nests, as pot holes are called — had deepened alarmingly in the drive and the farm roads. 

“Tiens!” exclaimed Monsieur Thierry, who arrived in his pick-up to give his view of the roads and how to repair them. He is the entrepreneur — operator and owner of big machinery — who put in the cattle fencing behind the Chateau, built the new parcs for managing the cattle when they are in the fields, put in bridges so the cattle wouldn’t have to ford the streams, dug septic systems, and buried fourreaux for electric cable. Last spring, he gave me a proposal for scarifying the roads and resurfacing. I chose la solution low-cost, low-technology option instead: a pile of tout-venant and a couple of men with shovels. 

Monsieur Thierry shook his head. “Mieux vaut prévenir que guérir.” An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

He descended from his truck and squelched across the basse-cour in tall rubber boots. 

“And there’s a drainage problem here,” he stated.

Yes. Once, there was a small, open pond in the basse-cour, a mare. It is shown on old maps of the Chateau. It was filled in and covered over many years ago. Monsieur Thierry pried up a trappe. Water lapped just under the metal plate. Over next to the former milking shed and the parc à vaches were two more metal plates. Here, too, water lurked almost at the level of the grass. Maybe the mare had been a better solution.

Meanwhile, we have been fixing the roof of the stabulation.  It was too dangerously close to collapse to allow the cows to come under shelter. Since the work was not finished before the rain, many are still out in the wet fields, much to the dismay of the farmer. Walking around in deep mud risks soil-born infections, especially to little calves and cows about to give birth. It creates ruts in the pastures. And no-one particularly enjoys hustling buckets of feed out to the cattle in the rain, when one could simply fill a manger in the stabu.

To add to our farmer’s indignation, the bed of the stabulation is a black lagoon. Hollow after decades of scooping out manure and dirty straw, it has filled with rain. We shook our heads. When I first took over the farm, Monsieur Yves had recommended we build the pad back up with crushed stone. Monsieur Thierry had given me an estimate. Like the roads, I’d postponed it.

The reproachful gaze of our farmer shifted. The couvreur had arrived to inspect the damage to the Chateau’s roof. He had a pump, he said. He promised to empty out the enormous puddle.

We went over to the Chateau. A large section of the roof behind the clock on the rear façade had lifted off in the wind. We climbed the stairs to the penultimate attic, four stories above the ground. 

One of the advantages of unexpected calamities is that you discover other problems. 

Monsieur Martyn, our handyman, who’d been the first to go up the stairs, pointed out a beam in the roof tree. One end was eaten away.

“That’s old damage,” observed the couvreur, comfortingly. Someone had sistered planks around the beam and cemented the assemblage into the wall.

Still, there was a mound of sawdust beneath the beam.

We decided to scrape the loose wood out of the beam, treat it with an insecticide, and then see what would happen next.

Later that day, as we took coffee after lunch, and he leafed through the business pages of Le Figaro, Monsieur pointed out that things weren’t so bad. Ciaran and Domingos, the two successive tempests that beat through Normandy this month, are only in fifth position behind Lothar and Martin, the top destroying storms of 1999. 

“That’s probably why no trees are down,” he added. Swathes of mature cedars and pines had topped in 1999. Although we were not owners of Courtomer then, we saw the piles of stumps when we explored the property six years later.

Lothar and Martin did 13.8 billion euros worth of damage, according to the insurance industry. Our recent duo, a paltry 1.3 billion.

The weather brightened up in the afternoon, as it often does in Normandy. Clusters of sprightly buds, nodding in the rose beds beside the moat, promise a burst of late blossom — as soon as the weather dries out.

          A bientôt, au château,
 

                 Elisabeth

P.S. Monsieur Martyn, gardener at Courtomer, sends this video of the stream in the Chateau’s parc after the storm.

www.chateaudecourtomer.com